1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to a hepatitis A virus. In particular, the present invention relates to a simian hepatitis A viral isolate AGM-27 as deposited with the American Type Culture Collection, 12031 Parklawn Drive, Rockville, Md., on Aug. 24, 1992 and having American Type culture Collection (ATCC) accession Number VR2380.
2. Background Information
Hepatitis-A virus (HAV) is a significant human pathogen that is spread via the fecal-oral route. HAV is a picornavirus that is endemic in underdeveloped areas of the world and causes 20-25% of clinical hepatitis in the developed countries.
Hepatitis A virus has been recovered from several species of New or Old World monkeys. It is not clear whether these isolates are true simian strains or human strains that have infected primates in captivity. Human strains can produce acute hepatitis in some higher primates such as the chimpanzee (Dienstag, J.L., et al. (1975) J. Infect. Dis. 132:532-545), marmoset (Saguinus species) (Deinhardt, F., et al. (1975) Amer. J. Med. Sci. 270:73-80) and owl monkey (Aotus trivigatus) (LeDuc, J.W., et al. (1983) Infect. Immun. 40:766-772), but only one group has reported that an Old World monkey (stump-tailed monkey, Macaca speciosa) (Mao, J.S., et al. (1981) J. Infect. Dis. 144:55-60) has developed acute hepatitis after experimental infection. An important question is how different human and simian isolates actually are.
Recently, comparison of partial genome sequences for two simian strains isolated respectively from an owl monkey (Brown, E.A., et al. (1989) J. Virol. 63:4932-4937) and a cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) (Balayan, M.S., et al. (1989) FEBS Lett. 247:425-428) revealed that these two simian strains differed greatly from human HAVs in the limited regions examined. The present invention provides the almost complete sequence of a simian HAV obtained from an African green monkey. Extensive sequence differences between this isolate and other simian and human strains are to be noted. In addition, it can be seen that the simian wild-type strain differs from a human wild-type strain in its ability to grow in simian cell cultures.